Journey to be Google Certified Associate Android Developer

It was in the end of May 2017, I saw this announcement about google offering scholarship to 500 android developer in Indonesia, google will covered up the Associate Android Developer Fast Track course fee in udacity and also the fee to take Associate Android Developer certification exam. So without any further consideration I enrolled.

Actually I’ve been quite familiar with Udacity since I took a lot of free course on it from two years ago, and also udacity is the first place where I start learnt android developement. what I really like from udacity is the sensation of the learning proccess. Where I can feel that I am in a real class and taught by the facilitator face to face.

A few weeks later I received an email from Google, I’ve passed the selection for the scholarship and now ready to start learning in the Udacity. The course will take about 3 months to complete and it has three projects that we need to complete but it’s not the requirements for taking the exam, when we have the scholarship we can immediately take the test. But I decided to finish all the projects in order to be more preapared and refreshed.

Udacity also provide us with a timeline for this course to make sure that we keep on the track.there is also a slack channel to get any updates from udacity or even scheduling webinar to discuss some particular topics. Udacity supports are very helpful to us.

I am going to breakdown all the three projects that I’ve done from the course and going to the exam process.

1. Popular Movie 1

This is the first project that we should done in the first stage of the course. we need to create an app that retrieve data from the internet, in this case from theMovieDB.org and show it inside of an android app. In the main screen we have to show posters of the movie in form of a grid view and when we clicked the posters it will take you to the detail screen and provide some informations about the movie such as title, duration, synopsis so on and so forth.

The project itself covered some basic component in android developement such as recycler view, network access, and how to design the app itself. when we finished the project then we need to submit it to the reviewer to review our work. We will get the review within 24 hours and if there is a requirement that we don’t do, we have to resubmit the project again.

2. Popular Movie 2

In the Popular Movie part two, we just need to add more functionality to the app. We required to add data persistence, feature to show the trailer of the movie that we clicked and also show the review in a form of a list.

I spent quite some time in this project because the data persistence thing. I am indulged by the existence of libraries out there that we can easily use to save bunch of time in our coding process so I rarely used the native one that android provides, so I need to read some documentations, looking up for tutorial and there is one feature in Udacity where you can ask your mentor if you stuck at something. After twice time of submit my project met criteria and I am good to proceed to the next stage. yeayyyy!

3. Baking App

The Final project before the certification exam, in this stage we need to create an app that can shows a step to bake a cake in form of video, the data itself provided by Udacity such as the video, description and image of the cake. For me this project covered all the topics that we’ve done in stage 1 and stage 2 also some additional topics. When we success to create all the functionality of the app we required to make a UI Test with espresso and add home screen widget.

4. Google Certification Exam

Before proceed to the exam, Udacity provide us some additional resources that might be tested inside of the exam which I found really helpful and also there is this awesome repository that wrap all the covered topics in the exam certification.

The exam has two stages which are the first is Coding and the second is Exit interview. The coding session you will be given a half done project that you need to complete, debug and test. All the requirements are very clear so you don’t need to worry. If you succeed at the first stage then you will be go to the exit interview. In the exit interview you will be questioned about your project and some fundamental of android developement.

Chek the official page for more info here

Since I am such a night person, I took the exam at 10 pm local time and required to submit it on the next day with the same exact time. Since I’ve been fully prepared for the exam so I don’t encounter with a such a big problem, yeah the key is being fully prepared both in time and the topics. My exit interview also went really well it only took less than 5 minutes.

I’ve been waiting for 10 days and today I received my badge and certificate xD and officially a Google Certified Associate Android Developer

My Certificate

Thanks for reading this Article and last but not least. I want to express my gratitude to Chaitra Ramanathan and Iip Permana(Udacity Support), Harshit Dwivedi(My Mentor), Kartik Arora(Reviewer also my Mentor xD, this has it own story) and all of the people that involved in this amazing journey.